


Cicatrix

by Symmet



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angels kind of get epiphanies too, Apocalypse-Smockalypse, Can be Samifer, Chuck is God, Doesn't Have to Be, Lucifer Character Study, Which - coincidentally - is what God basically says to Lucifer, really thats all it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-29
Updated: 2014-12-29
Packaged: 2018-03-04 03:36:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2907890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Symmet/pseuds/Symmet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucifer contemplates all the humans he hates and succumbs to the idea of the one human he doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> pretty much a collection of character studies I don't fully remember working on but found and decided to post anyways.

Lucifer used to look upon human souls and find them completely, irrevocably abominable. The imperfections were almost unbearable after a while - the cracks that time slowly carved into their souls was an affront, offensive in the delicate destruction of the near beauty of they possessed. Yes, it was true. Humans started out close to beauty. But only ugliness was born of it, a terrible mixture of sin and ruin.

He would ache to destroy it, erase every molecule of it, undo every second of it from the world. The perfect world he would have kept to himself. He would have purged it of human failure. He would have made it beautiful.

When he had been freed from the cage, he had fought the urge to destroy every passing human, each one an **infinitesimal** being, coating the world he revered so highly, their petty problems and selfish wishes screaming in his grace, begging to be grasped and compressed into something less offensive. But he had more important things to focus on, and he doubted Sam would appreciate his efforts.

He still felt that way most of the time.

Should his Father wish to forgive, there was only so much that could be done. He would never again fly amongst Heaven's ranks, never again serve the Host. He had already forsaken his love, already he had lost some vital part of his faith. And so much of his forgiveness would rely on his own abilities. His own ability to forgive.

His own ability to obey.

He did not think he could. _He couldn't._

Every atom of his grace, and whatever besides it now made up his existence, knew he could not.

As he could not learn to love humans, he could not learn to love his Father again. Not as he had before.

Never as he had before.


	2. Chapter 2

When God finally appeared before him, He waylaid Lucifer's strength - for he might have accidentally smote the mountain he had taken refuge on - and waited. He did not open His arms in greeting or peace, did not smile or frown, did not beckon. And yet He was absolute, even in the form He had taken, previously human and completely damaged, a mess of an alcoholic, whom all had thought was at most a prophet of the Lord.

It was, Lucifer privately admitted (or as privately as one could in the presence of the All-Knowing), spectacularly clever. No one could have suspected.

His Father spoke, and said He, "Lucifer, I hope you will try."

 _Try?_ He could not try, not here, not now, not with this. It was an inability. His Father must know this, must know that if Lucifer failed, it was because he was meant to.

That it was as it always would be.

"Free will was always my greatest gift. The Choice, Lucifer, is up to you - for you fell from Heaven and left behind those whose sole meaning was the Host and the orders they gave and thereby left what was predestined behind. You disobeyed, and now you must choose on your own; if you should fail, it be your own fault, and no culpability of Mine."

Lucifer never spoke aloud when his Father arrived - in no dimension did he make a noise. His mind was silent and still, enamored by his Father's presence.

Chuck Shurley spread His arms, a gesture to pacify, though Lucifer made no move either welcoming or hostile.

"Do you not think you could learn to love humanity?"

It was inconceivable, it was untouchable, unbelievable, there was no universe he could have thought he would exist in peace with, let alone love of, humans.

But he would never again feel welcome in Heaven, and if possible, he detested demons more than humans (although, in reality he barely differentiated between them. If humans were maggots, then demons were flies. Eventually they were the same).

Earth was all that would be left to him. _But no._

Humanity was something revolting, something that tested his very control. He had lost the absolute love he had placed in his Father, but he still loved all he had created - besides humans. Humans, who were selfish and greedy and _ugly_. Still so radically flawed.

His Father sighed, almost mockingly human in the simplicity.

"Not one human?"

His Father tilted Chuck Shurley's head and smiled sadly. He was gone before Lucifer could answer.

 _No_. He thought. _Not one._

And yet...


	3. Chapter 3

The impossibility that was Samuel Winchester was part antagonizing, part agonizing, and part traitorous bliss.

Lucifer craved his attention, his breath, his presence.

Lucifer saw his soul, maimed beyond the majority of the souls he detested above all, and felt absolutely no urge to smite him. The amount of protective wrath that filled him was exactly the opposite.

Lucifer almost hated it.

He saw Sam's soul and he wanted to know _more._

Every second spent looking at a human he viewed as a waste, a mistake, something to be forgotten, quickly, remedied and replaced with any other memory. But _Sam_.

He could spend eternity going over Samuel's soul.

He saw the twisted places where demon blood had rotted away at it, acid burning at the soul like holy fire to grace.

Samuel Winchester, unlike most humans, was more or less the same at heart for it, though he acted harder, colder, his trust less susceptible to being earned. But those were traits well known by all Hunters. In fact, he was better than most of them.

Demon blood could have done so much worse.

Most would have withered away, or slowly become monsters, turning to demons outside of Hell. For demons blood truly was like flame, like poison. It did not halt until it was well and truly destroyed, it spread. Unless the consumer was purged completely, it would in turn consume them.

The demon blood's growth in Sam was halted by his earliest introduction to it - when he was barely six months old. It also stopped it from physically killing him. That was the extent of protection he was provided.

His soul was ugly, yet at it's core… undiluted by what had ravaged it. It stayed eternal, untainted and untroubled.

Lucifer knew this, as he felt it at the very center of his being, that Sam was still much the same.

What was extraordinary, if you took the time to look closely at his soul, through the trauma gilded on like a mask, was _why._

The soul was scarred and yet nothing more, as if it was cocooned in it's ugliness, still glinting underneath, catching in the light of the actions he carried out that were laced with probity. Outside it was ugly, but within, it was almost impeccable.

This was not because he was Lucifer's vessel, or because of the demon's blood.

This was because of the sheer excess of his morality - his humanity, even.

Samuel Winchester had a good soul.

It would never be mistaken for pure, but it was **good.**

Lucifer saw the ugly gouges in his soul, the metaphysical marks the demon blood left. He saw the other, almost crueler veins of circumstance in it as well.

_The death of his mother. His childhood. Never belonging. Wanting to be normal. Fighting to protect people, and occasionally failing. Rebelling and then running._

_Wishing he hadn't looked back._

Then there was the weight of Lucifer.

The connection they shared and Samuel denied - out of fear, out of disgust, out of duty, even out of love for his brother. It was shoved along with all the knowledge Lucifer's existence brought with him out of his soul but yet on top of it. It dragged him down, a pressure he could never be free of.

_His mother's death was his fault. Their lives were his fault. His own failures._

_Everything was his fault._

Most of all, Samuel's sudden, terrible epiphany.

He had ached for angels, his faith was a sign of repentance.

He had wanted forgiveness.

He discovered he was Lucifer's true vessel.

He did not lose faith so much as he was broken by it. He lost faith in his ability to be forgiven.

Much as Lucifer once had, himself.

But Samuel hadn't chosen that. He hadn't chosen what he was made to be. And Lucifer could relate to that too, in a manner. It was fate, he had known, always was as it would.

But Samuel had something Lucifer had not - the entitlement to free will. The inherent belief in his own choices and what they did - their consequences.

Lucifer's decisions were not tested by free will - he believed himself to be right because he was doing it.

But Samuel knew guilt, which Lucifer did not feel. Which weighed almost as heavily as Lucifer's existence did upon his soul.

Lucifer saw his soul and knew it was in relation to a normal human's nauseating, even especially to creatures like angels (who did not posess gag reflexes) because of their ability to see, to sense, to feel the souls around them. He knew that Castiel had called Samuel an abomination, and rather than taking offense (well, taking extreme offense. Samuel would not be spoken of like that. But Castiel had shown affection to Sam once he'd accepted the wound that was Samuel's soul. So Lucifer pardoned him.) he used that as a guide for how an unbiased angel would see it. Of course, Sam's soul had still been flush with Demon blood at the time, as of then, yet to be completely gone from his system.

Lucifer knew Samuel's soul was ugly. But the deformity caused by the Demon's blood was more an abscess, a large growth that covered the undeniable morality beneath. Lucifer shouldn't care because morality was nothing to him. Was supposed to be nothing to him.

He saw the soul and wanted not to destroy, not to smite or remove or erase.

He wanted to heal.

To expend grace upon the soul and remove it's blemishes and morbid state.

He wanted to rend his grace.

_Upon a human soul._

And he could have said it was because he wanted to care for his vessel in all dimensions of it (for really that was where souls existed - on another plane as the bodies they were tied to), but he knew it was a lie.

And how many times had he said he didn't lie?

It was simply Sam. Broken, yet unbowed. Beautiful. His.

_Human._

But healing Samuel with his grace would have damaged their connection. Rather, it would have made Samuel's soul less of a match to Lucifer's own ruined state. It felt like it would have been cheating, trying to fix himself through Sam. It made Sam not Sam, and that felt, in the least ironic sense of the word, blasphemous.

So he'd stayed away, too captivated to fix the mutilations. And that was worse, in it's own sense. That he could be captivated by Samuel's soul, when it was supposedly so disgusting in comparison to all the other souls he had shred and ripped and disfigured.

He knew that he could not fix Sam. But he could heal him.

If Samuel ever accepted him, gave him that little amount of trust (which he couldn't, of course, not as long as he feared Lucifer would use him, "wear him to the apocalypse". And there was really almost no way to stop that - a lifetime of hearing of the Devil, then of seeing what Lucifer was capable of, of fighting monsters Lucifer had created, of knowing that a Demon had killed his mother and ruined his life), he would do it. He could heal Sam, he knew it was possible.

Slowly, of course. Not the ramshackle, hurried pace that Castiel had taken in Hell that had called for a physical branding. No doubt if Dean could not recollect it, it was because it had been so incredibly painful, overpowering. Brash, coarse, even, but effective. But then again, the scars of Hell were a different sort of ugliness. If Samuel was morality at it's best, then Dean Winchester was righteousness.

Righteousness shown a thousand times brighter than morality. It was valued as better, although it was lesser in some ways. It was not as humble, and so it was morality that sought and found less attention. And Lucifer had been content not to expend his attention upon it. But it was hard to ignore righteousness. Especially after having loved and lost Michael so fiercely and finally. And, as terrible as Hell had been to Dean, less of his abrasions were self inflicted to his soul than Samuel's. Castiel tore away the torture of Hell that had been done to Dean's soul by others - it was the ruin in it caused by Dean's own breaking and succumbing that Castiel could not remove. But it was an entirely different situation to Sam's own self-destruction.

And Sam had not been forced into drinking the blood.

Coerced, perhaps.

But he’d done it on his own, and so the scars were ever deeper for it.

ever more unable to be forgiven.

Especially when he was so loathe to forgive _himself._


	4. Chapter 4

Lucifer suddenly found himself in an odd place. Without purpose, he supposed it could be called. 

Never, not once in his entire existence, had he been without purpose. Constantly he had something to put his grace into, something to work towards. Once, it had been to carry out his Father's orders, to revel in the world He had created, to love his brothers and sisters. Then, when he had fallen, it had become spite, and hatred and agony and even misery. It had been cunning, and patience, because he knew of the apocalypse, and the chance to regain not what he lost, but what had been taken from him. 

Because of Fate, because he had believed himself to be right, absolute in what his faith became, because Angels were creatures of faith, and he'd needed something to pour his faith into, and had let it fuel him in return. 

Now he is prompted with this, an errant, unedited line in the play he has been orchestrated into his entire existence. 

What he does can change the prophecy, can undo and unmake that which the prophets of the Lord had said in His Name. 

It is as if his world is unraveling again, or, more as if he only watched it begin to unravel when he was cast down, and suddenly now he notices that all the threads are falling away. Leaving darkness. 

If he can admit anything into the abyss about what he feels and believes and knows... 

He will be alone again. 

He now found himself without that purpose, because he does not know what to do. 

Suddenly the questions long probed by humanity are plaguing him, who used to watch on disinterestedly, secretly assured of his own place. 

He had been betrayed by all things, and all things had betrayed him. There was no solace, no respite from his own rage, his own pain. He was alone, cursed to an eternity like that until Michael killed him. 

Lucifer would watch the world waste away and bear itself up again. He didn’t know what he would do. 

Nothing? 

No, he would not be able to. 

The answer was simple of course. 

It had always been the same one. 

Sam.


End file.
